CLOSE DIRTY, DANGEROUS
HANFORD NUCLEAR POWER PLANT
If I am elected governor, I will encourage Washington close the nuclear Columbia Generating Station in Richland as soon as possible.
The Columbia Generation Station is owned by Energy Northwest, formerly known as Washington Power Supply System, or WPPSS. Remember WPPSS? It was also known as Whoops. There were to be five nuclear plants built in Washington. Only one was completed. Another was started and then cancelled before completion. WPPSS went through bankruptcy.
Nuclear power is a bankrupt endeavor from the start. There is no way that the revenue generated can ever pay for the cost of safeguarding highly radioactive waste for 250,000 years.
The Columbia Generation Station is substantially the same GE model as the Fukushima reactors which melted down and exploded in 2011. It is dirty, dangerous, and expensive. It is an accident waiting to happen.
The Columbia Generation Station lies in an area subject to frequent wildfires, which are sometimes so bad that access to it is blocked.
The Columbia Generating Station is located near the Grand Coulee earthquake epicenter. Grand Coulee was hit by a 7.4 Richter scale earthquake in 1972.
If such an earthquake strikes again, it could cause the failure of the Grand Cooley Dam. Further, there are several earthen damns upstream from the Grand Cooley Dam, and a failure of any one of them could cascade down to the Grand Cooley Dam and cause its failure. If this happened, Richland and the Columbia Generating Station would be flooded. Without reliable power to cool the reactor and the spent fuel pools, the reactor would catch on fire and burn – perhaps for a hundred years – radioactively poisoning the world.
The Columbia Generating Station lies close to the nuclear waste stored at Hanford. If the reactor went critical and released radioactivity, workers would not be able to access the radioactive waste at Hanford and keep it from overheating and exploding.
Conversely, if one of the storage tanks at Hanford exploded and released radioactivity, workers would not be able to access the Columbia Generating Station and its spent fuel pools. If either happened, we would face a catastrophe.
The Columbia Generating Station emits large quantities of radioactive gases including tritium, cesium, krypton, and xenon. That is not just steam belching forth from the cooling towers. Nothing is said about these radioactive gas emissions because nothing can be done to stop them. It is a cover up.
Nuclear power is not carbon free. Enormous amounts of fossil fuel are used to mine, process, and refine uranium. More fossil fuel is used to provide backup power to circulate water in the reactor and the spent fuel pools when the nuclear plant is shut down, which happens frequently and for long periods of time.
Washington should not support this absurd way to boil water.
Washington can do more to reduce consumption of nuclear power and fossil fuels by relying on solar, wind, biomass, geothermal, wave, and tidal energy.
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We must learn a lesson from the Fukishima disaster. The time of nuclear power must come to an end. Nuclear power plants are extreme hazards to civilization. We must shut them down as quickly as possible, and that includes the Columbia Generating Station.
Each nuclear plant is a probable permanent dead zone. The cost of “cleaning them up” is astronomical and probably impossible. We cannot clean up nuclear waste; we can only relocate it.
There is so much plutonium in unprotected storage at the 103 nuclear plants in the United States, that cooling it and storing it safely may be impossible. It will have to be guarded and protected for tens of thousands of years.
Nuclear power was a swindle from the beginning. It was undertaken to produce plutonium for bombs and to keep the nuclear industry and its nuclear engineers employed after the end of World War II.
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If Earth were hit with a coronal mass ejection of the size of the Carrington Event of 1859, electrical power would be knocked out almost everywhere. Without backup generators, nuclear power plants would not be able to cool spent fuel in spent fuel pools. Hundreds of nuclear power plants around the world would catch fire, killing off life for millions of years.
It is highly likely that there will be a hiatus in our future, when the majority of humans and other animals are killed off, and a nuclear catastrophe is one way it could happen.
If Fukashima’s Number 3 reactor were to collapse, spent fuel would be spread out on the ground, and without water to cool it, it would catch on fire and burn for a hundred years. The entire Northern Hemisphere would be a dead zone. Tornadoes, hurricanes, earthquakes, and tsunamis can also disable nuclear plants.
Nuclear production of energy was a mistake from the beginning and it must be terminated. The sooner we start the better.
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Germany sets new solar power record, institute says
BERLIN (Reuters) – German solar power plants produced a world record 22 gigawatts of electricity per hour – equal to 20 nuclear power stations at full capacity – through the midday hours on Friday and Saturday, the head of a renewable energy think tank said.
The German government decided to abandon nuclear power after the Fukushima nuclear disaster last year, closing eight plants immediately and shutting down the remaining nine by 2022.
They will be replaced by renewable energy sources such as wind, solar and bio-mass. Read more from Reuters.
James Robert Deal, Attorney & Broker
425-771-1110, 888-999-2022
James at James Deal dot com
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